Exercise - review a portrait sequence

The shoot was set up using a tripod and the natural light of a large side window. I tilted the bracket on the tripod in order to take portrait orientated images. I placed my subject on the floor in the window with a plant in the background. My lens was a 17-17mm, had I more space I would have preferred to use the zoom more in order to blur the background, as it was, these images were taken at around 28mm.

i found that using the tripod in order to talk to the subject to avert the eyes from the camera an interesting technique as it allowed me to talk naturally to the subject and distract from the camera, the use of an automatic shutter would have been useful as it would eliminate the distraction from looking at the camera display to check the image.

Sophie is a very expressive model and quite easy to get expressions out of, also she's my daughter so she found it easy to follow my instructions. The images were taken too quickly to take notes in between frames but my thoughts were to check the subject was in the frame (especially as I'd zoomed in quite close), but also as my model is quite expressive and moves quite quickly, I needed to check that images weren't blurred by movement. The shutter speed used was 1/13 sec.

Whilst I was shooting the images I thought would be the best were:

because when I was taking the photo's, Sophie was tilting her head a little and playing with her hair, which I thought would look nice, as it turned out the shutter speed wasn't fast enough to capture this movement well enough and the angle of the image just dosen't look right with the angle of the face.

I felt the best images were:

My best photo from the selection is seen below, I created a virtual copy and using Lightroom 5, made a few changes to highlight just the face and increased the blue of the model's eyes. It's quite a stark look for a young face maybe but I wasn't altogether happy with the background: